definition of a task

1.2 TYPES OF TASK
There are three main categories of task: information-gap, reasoning-gap, and opinion-gap.
Information-gap activity, which involves a transfer of given information from one person to another – or from one form to another, or from one place to another – generally calling for the decoding or encoding of information from or into language. One example is pair work in which each member of the pair has a part of the total information (for example an incomplete picture) and attempts to convey it verbally to the other. Another example is completing a tabular representation with information available in a given piece of text. The activity often involves selection of relevant information as well, and learners may have to meet criteria of completeness and correctness in making the transfer.
An information gap task is a technique in language teaching where students are missing information necessary to complete a task or solve a problem, and must communicate with their classmates to fill in the gaps. It is often used in communicative language teaching and task-based language learning. Information gap tasks are contrasted with opinion gap tasks, in which all information is shared at the start of the activity, and learners give their own opinions on the information given.
One example of an information gap task is a spot-the-difference activity.Another is an activity where one student is given a picture, and must describe it to another student, who creates a drawing from the description. Further examples are students sharing information to complete a class timetable, and an activity where students must share information about their families and then draw each other's family trees.
Information gap tasks are also used to test language ability. According to Underhill, these kind of tasks have the advantage that they produce concrete evidence of communicative competence, or of the lack of it, but the disadvantage of only testing the ability to communicate factual information. He goes on to say that with information gap tasks, care must be taken not to create a test which tests general problem-solving ability more than language fluency.
In my teaching I try to use several kinds of activities in order to get my students involved and interested. Information gap activity (the activity in which students have to exchange information as they are not given it in full) is one of them and my students prefer this activity over the other ones because while doing information gap activities students practice real communication. They ask questions and answer them in order to get information and this is what we do in real life. Only through communicating successfully can they get information to fulfill the task of the activity.
Information gap activities in my lessons are done by working in pairs. Both students are given tables or pictures with missing information. Each student has information which his/her partner does not have. What is missing in one student’s picture or table is present in the partner’s card. Students have to ask each other questions to find out the missing information.
Teachers can use such kind of activities with the students of different levels varying the complexity of information.
There is a task for each partner to ask questions and answer them using Past Simple Tense.
Example
Student A: What did Bob get on his birthday?
Student B: He got colourful balloons.
Student A: What did he drink?
Student B: Bob drank Fanta.
Student A: What did Jane eat on New Year’s Day?
Student B: She ate turkey.
Then students are instructed to take turns. Student B asks and Student A answers. It is essential that Students do not show their information to each other. It is also important to provide students with enough time as you may have differently paced pairs. This activity can be further extended if students are given empty tables and they are asked to complete them themselves. Then they can continue to exchange information. If you do so, you turn this activity into even more student centred exercise.
Information gap activities can be designed to all language skills. They may require students to use their reading, listening, speaking and sometimes writing skills to exchange information in order to complete the task. This activity can be a nice way to get students to practice new vocabulary and grammar. You should always remember to follow the rule that states that one student should have the information that the other student needs and only by following this you can guarantee the authenticity of communication.
Information gap activities usually work well because they encourage the learners to speak English meaningfully. Students are more motivated when they talk to each other in English. Of course, there are a lot of activities which invite learners to speak, but there may be some students who feel shy among people and while working in groups they may not speak. And information gap activities give them an opportunity to talk to their partner only. This creates personal security. You can observe students at work and once you are sure that they feel comfortable you can modify one-to-one into group-to-group information gap activity.
An interesting experiment may be to ask students to come up with the instructions for the information gap activity by themselves. In may take more time of the lesson however students will feel more responsibility once they start doing the activity.

There is one important issue that a teacher should consider when implementing information gap activities and this is how these activities can be assessed. If you decided to evaluate student during this type of activities you have to spend enough time to design proper assessment criteria. Do not forget to communicate these to your students so that they know how they will get their mark.

It seems to me that information gap activities can be considered an excellent opportunity for effective learning as they have all of the characteristics of a successful speaking activity highlighted by Ur (1996):
1. Learners talk a lot. As much as possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact occupied by learner talk.
2. Participation is even. All get a chance to speak and contributions are fairly evenly distributed.
3. Motivation is high. Learners are eager to speak, because they are interested in the topic and have something new to say about it.
4. Language is of an acceptable level. Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily comprehensible to each other.
One more principle is important to follow and it states that the activities are effective when they vary. Do not use only pictures or only tables every time. You can use crosswords, maps, toys as well. It may seem difficult to create a variety of information gap activities, but to support communicative language teaching, one of the most important aspects of which is speaking, language teachers should seek the ways to motivate their students to speak English as much as possible.
Reasoning-gap activity, which involves deriving some new information from given information through processes of inference, deduction, practical reasoning, or a perception of relationships or patterns. One example is working out a teacher's timetable on the basis of given class timetables. Another is deciding what course of action is best (for example cheapest or quickest) for a given purpose and within given constraints. The activity necessarily involves comprehending and conveying information, as in an information-gap activity, but the information to be conveyed is not identical with that initially comprehended. There is a piece of reasoning which connects the two.
Task-based language teaching is a student-centered approach to second language instruction. It is an offshoot of the communicative approach, wherein activities focus on having students use authentic target language in order to complete meaningful tasks, i.e. situations they might encounter in the real world and other project-based assignments.
These project could include visiting the doctor, making a phone call, conducting an interview in order to find answers to specific questions or gathering information to make a poster or advertisement.
In task-based teaching the focus is not on grammar—you have already introduced your students to necessary constructions earlier in the chapter or unit, as well as to the vocabulary they will need to complete the task—but rather on helping students develop linguistic strategies for completing the assigned tasks within the constraints of what they know of the target language. Because the emphasis is on spontaneous, creative language use, whether spoken or written, rather than on absolute accuracy, assessment is based on task outcome.
Based on the discussion of the research, it could be concluded that reasoning-gap activity was very helpful for the students in the process of teaching and learning writing. The current study made it clear that reasoning-gap activity was definitely more effective than traditional approach in teaching writing in general and in teaching writing mode like discussion text in particular. In fact, teaching writing to the twelfth grade students through reasoning-gap activity had all of the advantages of the process approach to writing such as the focus on the processes involved in the pre-writing, during writing and post-writing phases. Reasoning-gap activity paid enough attention to all of the processes which are involved in producing a good discussion text. It fully considered such processes and helped students to brainstorm and develop more new ideas; it also activated their previous schemata and background knowledge, motivates the students and encourages them to write with concerning over specific language items. Hence, it could be stated that the use of reasoning-gap activity was effective in teaching writing arguments to the twelfth grade students.
Related to the findings of the research, there are some suggestions: (1) to the academic institution. There is a need in the classroom activities to provide more activities to have writing 10 task because it will encourage the students to write. It needs more opportunities to make the students improve their writing skill. Considering the potential of reasoning-gap activity in enhancing students’ skills in English, it is necessary for the teacher to learn about reasoning-gap activity. Therefore, the school can facilitate this by conducting workshops on reasoning-gap activity, (2) to the English teacher. This study can be used as a reference for the English teacher in improving the quality of teaching by applying the suitable approach toward improving the students’ writing ability. Besides, the teacher can apply reasoning-gap activity in the other aspect of English skills like reading, listening, or speaking. The research findings are expected to give insight to the teaching writing. The correct mechanics, content, and organization can be achieved by giving more chances to the students to write. The teacher should be able to develop the teaching learning materials that have been provided in the curriculum, (3) to other researchers. This research is expected to be useful to other researchers particularly those who are interested in conducting a similar research by giving more various tasks (e.g. jigsaw task, problem-solving task, decision-making task, and so on).
Opinion-gap activity, which involves identifying and articulating a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in response to a given situation. One example is story completion; another is taking part in the discussion of a social issue. The activity may involve using factual information and formulating arguments to justify one's opinion, but there is no objective procedure for demonstrating outcomes as right or wrong, and no reason to expect the same outcome from different individuals or on different occasions.
In order to accomplish the opinion-gap task, the students in the experimental group needed to participate in discussions in which they had to state their personal ideas, attitudes and feelings. In fact they had more language output than the control group. That is, they struggled to use their language knowledge to convey their intentions so they became more fluent than the control group students. In 948 Amir Marzban and Mojgan Hashemi / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 70 ( 2013 ) 943 – 948 addition, due to the correction of grammatical and lexical problems by the teacher at the post task phase, the learners in the experimental group were more accurate at the post-test. As a result of doing the opinion-gap task, the students in the experimental group could benefit from their partners' language input which was useful for improving their speaking ability. In addition, the students in the experimental group were more motivated and interested in speaking than the other group. All in all, the researchers believe that the opinion-gap task might be more effective for advanced learners as they have more language and world knowledge than the intermediate learners to discuss the controversial issues and it can be concluded that the opinion-gap task could be helpful for the learners who are motivated and not s h y to have discussion about their feelings, preferences, and their ideas.
The purpose of this section was to investigate the effect of opinion gap task on the speaking ability of EFL learners. To achieve this purpose, a null hypothesis was developed: opinion gap task does not enhance significantly Iranian intermediate EFL learners' speaking ability. To test this hypothesis, the study used a Quasi-experimental design. The subjects consisted of 64 male and female students who were selected from among 90 intermediate EFL learners by applying a proficiency test. The participants in the experimental group received the treatment while the students in the control group received the conventional method. An oral interview was used both as the pretest and posttest. The results indicated that opinion gap task enhances EFL learners speaking ability, but not significantly enough to reject the stated null hypothesis.